I would personally recommend popos or mint. I have varying amount of experience with the others.

Bazzite is very hyped on Lemmy, I don’t quite understand how it works, it seems good for what it is, but I don’t know if I would recommend it as someone’s first Linux daily driver.

Manjaro seems great most of the time, until the maintainers mess something up and royally screw up your system. But that’s just things I’ve heard, your milage will vary.

Nobara worked really well for me, but ultimately I wasn’t very comfortable to use a distro maintained by one guy, even if that guy is glorious egg roll.

I personally use popos. I wish it was fedora based like Nobara, but you can’t have it all. Wow works straight out the box. There are appimages or deb packages for warcraft logs and curse as well, so they work fine.

How easy is it to get gaming on Debian (as OP mentioned occasional gaming)? I use Popos myself, so all nvidia drivers and gamemode and such works out the box.

Huh. I did as well. Like /use/bin was for user installed applications and such. You learn something everyday.

I’ve only used DaVinci for small projects, so I don’t know their eco system too well, but what made you buy a product when you were having problems getting it to work? :O Does the studio version offer better hardware acceleration or something like that?

It was a lot of fun for me. I did it without a virtual machine (would not generally recommend) on a older laptop I wasn’t using anyway. I wasn’t very successful in the end however. My own built kernel couldn’t produce any vga output. I tried to fix it for a handful of nights, but in the end gave up and called it good enough :P So I might comeback to it later to fully complete an installation.

But it was good learning oppertunity. It showed that just compiling a version of the Linux kernel isn’t very complicated. It even comes with a very nice TUI to select your build options!